July 31, 2010

I remember when my holy priest first arrived in Northrend and started picking up haste gear. “Gee,” thought I to myself, “I can now cast Resurrection in 9.98 seconds instead of 10, which I guess is technically an improvement, but what’s the point?” Then I went on my very first Naxxramas run and watched the tank go from full health to dead in less time than it took me to cast a single Greater Heal. “Oh,” thought I to myself, “that’s the point.”

July 24, 2010

Okay, I don’t like making comics that you have to read the accompanying text in order to understand (Penny Arcade can get away with that, but I’m no Penny Arcade– not even in the dreams I have inside my dreams am I at their level of awesome), but I’m afraid this one needs a little explanation.

So, we all know that Alliance and Horde can’t talk to each other, but why not? Wowwiki.com has this explanation:

In the Beta, the undead player characters spoke Common (besides Orcish) and thus could communicate with Alliance characters. This led to a huge amount of vitriol and bile that was spewed both ways, so this functionality was removed and Gutterspeak was introduced. (From Gutterspeak.)

Seriously, Blizzard? Seriously? Vitriol and bile? Have you heard of trade chat? Popped into Dalaran lately? If vitriol and bile are a reason to cut off communication options, you’d better just remove chat from the game altogether.

Communication between Horde and Alliance is now limited to /yells of “A N A L N I G G A!!“, which I think we can all agree is so much more respectful and polite than the alternative.

It seems that much of the playing population has decided that RealID is a bad idea, something the executives at Blizzard apparently didn’t anticipate as they keep backpedaling on how widespread RealID is supposed to be. To be fair, there are some useful features to RealID, like finally being able to chat with your friends across the artificial Alliance/Horde faction divide, but I see no reason why these useful features should depend upon using your real name and should bring with them exposing your out-of-game identity to bunches of people you don’t know.

I was trying to figure out a comic that would make some kind of insightful commentary on this troubling impulse from Blizzard to do away with in-game anonymity, but the problem is that my characters don’t really have out-of-game identities. I don’t know who’s sitting behind the keyboard playing Gord or Alaxia or Hurgon, any more than I know who’s behind the keyboard playing most of the characters I like to run dungeons and raids with. So instead I took the idea of “WoW turns into Facebook!” and ran with it, resulting in the silly comic you see today, completely devoid of insight, commentary, or anything remotely similar.